Still, an hour out was an hour out—­three hundred and sixty-five hours a year—­three months’ delay in finishing his book.  Making allowance for increased productivity, a month and a half’s delay.  And that was only a beginning.  The Post—­Klinker’s Exercises for All Parts of the Body—­Klinker himself, who called frequently—­now Fifi (eighteen minutes this very evening)—­who could say where the mad dissipation would end?  On some uncharted isle in the far South Seas, perchance, a man might be let alone to do his work.  But in this boarding-house, it was clear now, the effort was foredoomed and hopeless.  Once make the smallest concession to the infernal ubiquity of the race, once let the topmost bar of your gate down never so little, and the whole accursed public descended with a whoop to romp all over the premises.  What, oh, what was the use of trying?...

“Ah, Mr. Queed—­well met!  Won’t you stop in and see me a little while?  You’re enormously busy, I know—­but possibly I can find something to interest you in my poor little collection of books.”

Nicolovius, coming up the stairs, had met Queed coming down, pad in hand.  The impertinence of the old professor’s invitation fitted superbly with the bitterness of the little Doctor’s humor.  It pressed the martyr’s crown upon his brow till the perfectness of his grudge against a hateful world lacked nor jot nor tittle.

“Oh, certainly!  Certainly!” he replied, with the utmost indignation.

Nicolovius, bowing courteously, pushed open the door.

It was known in the boarding-house that the remodeling of the Second Hall Back into a private bathroom for Nicolovius had been done at his own expense, and rumor had it that for his two rooms—­his “suite,” as Mrs. Paynter called it—­he paid down the sum of eighteen dollars weekly.  The bed-sitting-room into which he now ushered his guest was the prettiest room ever seen by Mr. Queed, who had seen few pretty rooms in his life.  Certainly it was a charming room of a usual enough type:  lamp-lit and soft-carpeted; brass fittings about the fireplace where a coal fire glowed; a large red reading-table with the customary litter of books and periodicals; comfortable chairs to sit in; two uncommonly pretty mahogany bookcases with quaint leaded windows.  The crude central identity about all bedrooms that had hitherto come within Queed’s ken, to wit, the bed, seemed in this remarkable room to be wanting altogether.  For how was he, with his practical inexperience, to know that the handsome leather lounge in the bay-window had its in’ards crammed full of sheets, and blankets, and hinges and collapsible legs?

The young man gravitated instinctively toward the bookcases.  His expert eye swept over the titles, and his gloom lightened a little.

“You have some fair light reading here, I see,” he said, plucking out a richly bound volume of Lecky’s History of European Morals.